I know Americans like to hate Nissan but outside the US the Leaf was a pretty reasonable first stab at an electric car, before Tesla and is into its second rev now. It’s by no means the best one but given they were early to the market it’s a little unfair to blame all Japanese car makers.
Carlos Ghosn is an interesting character, and maybe not the best person, but some of the things he said to Nissan's board at the time about EVs were prophetic. He did give Nissan a leg up versus other Japanese brands. It is interesting to wonder if his original plan for Nissan America might have been the best call and Americans would have a very different view of Nissan had it happened. (Nissan America makes entirely different cars from every other division of the company. Ghosn's plan at one point was to rebrand the gas guzzler-focused Nissan America as [back to] Datsun, reintroduce Nissan in America as an EV brand and plan to eventually jettison New Datsun as soon as its profits dropped below a threshold that the board would allow it.)
It's unfair to blame all Japanese car makers, but it is definitely fair to blame all American brands of Japanese car makers (as the weird, highly profitable step-children that they are).
I wasn’t aware of the US specific aspect to Nissan, here in the UK the Qashqai flies off the production line as is pretty much single handedly keeping the North East economy alive with the Sunderland plant kicking out 500,000 cars a year
Agreed that the Nissan Leaf was not a bad introduction to EVs. It sucks that they took so long to get to 200-250 mile EPA range, though, which really ought to be the minimum (along with 100kW DC charging) for a pure electric vehicle. But at least they were doing something.
Sadly it did take them a long time to get up to the higher ranges. I think they wanted to wait for the new rev to come out on the typical 7 year cycle and out their efforts into that model rather than extensively improve the (ugly) first version.
